College Scholars News

Alina Clay, a junior from Memphis, is one of ten undergraduates selected from an applicant pool representing more than 160 universities nationwide to receive a prestigious 2016 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship.

“We all respond to stress in different ways. Some get headaches. Some get heart disease. But the underlying mechanisms for the basis of this variation is not fully understood,” Sahba Seddighi told Quest magazine last October. A senior in the College Scholars Program, she studies neuroplasticity—how the brain changes as a result of life experiences. >> Video

From being a reporter at a newspaper in the country of Myanmar to teaching in an inner city school in Indianapolis to exploring their creativity through digital media, art, and theater, many of the students graduating this spring have plans that will make their mark on the world.

After being accepted into College Scholars, John McAmis, UT’s sole animation major, developed his curriculum, composed of independent courses where he makes his own syllabus. His advisor, associate professor of art and local filmmaker Paul Harrill, looks over the syllabus and approves McAmis’s schedule.

R. J. Vogt, a Haslam Scholar and senior in the College Scholars program, has won a Princeton in Asia fellowship that will allow him to spend at least a year working at a bilingual newspaper in the country of Myanmar. Vogt, of Nashville will leave in August to work at the Myanmar Times, a weekly newspaper that is transitioning to a daily. He’ll be living in Yangon, the city formerly known as Rangoon.

Improving global health care. Designing better medical equipment. Revolutionizing the food industry. Teaching English in France. Those are just a few of the ways graduating Haslam Scholars plan to leave their mark on society after graduating. The Class of 2014 includes thirteen students from the university’s premier scholarship program. The graduates say the Haslam Scholars program challenged them academically, gave them a chance to work alongside leading faculty members, and afforded them the opportunity to travel and participate in extracurricular projects.

Alex Houck, a senior, has received a 2014–2015 Fulbright International Scholarship to Spain. Houck will assist in molecular neurobiological research in Madrid, analyzing proteins in the brains of mice to learn more about Alzheimer’s disease. He also will take intensive Spanish courses and volunteer at a university teaching hospital.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Roald Hoffmann will be at UT for a staged reading of his new play Something That Belongs to You at 2:00 p.m. Saturday, April 20, in the Ula Love Doughty Carousel Theatre. The performance, directed by Dennis E. Perkins, is free and open to the public, and Hoffmann will be available afterward to discuss his work.